H.P. Lovecraft: Nyarlathotep - short story review

"And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh [...] He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet." (Complete Fiction of H.P Lovecraft, p. 138)

At times Lovecraft's overly descriptive prose is a hit and other times it's a miss—this very short story has been a miss for me. To many convoluted descriptions without the usual mystery and intrigue. The introduced character—a mysterious Egyptian godlike guru with paranormal abilities who walks around different towns performing unusual things in front of an audience—seems a bit out of place from Lovecraft's universe, although not entirely. He seems like a mythologized version of Freddy Krueger, causing people to have nightmares and changing their perception of reality. The story is too short for it to have any memorable effect on me.

I have heard that this character (also called "The Crawling Chaos") is further developed in his later stories (I'm reading them chronologically), so there's some promise I guess. We'll see, but this one doesn't cut it for me.

Rating: 2/5